Daughter of Vengeance
by Ember A. Keelty
Summary: Beloved, revered, and utterly alone, a bitter old woman tells her story.
1. A Wild Red Rose

I ought to begin these confessions by setting out my intentions in writing them down. I ought to, but unfortunately I _have_ no intentions, only compulsions. I am old. My body limits my movements, and I grow restless. I am alone, and I have no one to confide in. I will die soon, and what's left of the truth will die with me.

The truth! I am _lousy_ with truth. I am sick with it. I need to be bled. They sing songs of me in this town too. Are they _trying_ to provoke me? They could at least have the decency to wait until I'm dead to praise me.

No, no one will praise me when I am dead. These notes will see to that. I will leave them behind me. On my deathbed, I will clutch them to my breast. The people will find them, and when they read them they will see — what _will_ they see, I wonder? What will they think of their heroine then?

But that's the end. I should start at the beginning.

My father was a decent, hard-working man. He had been a skilled and patriotic soldier in the wars, and though it won him no fame he did manage to secure in wages enough to purchase a bit of land in a small but fertile village in the east of Kiiro. He met my mother there, and married for love. She died bearing me, and he never loved nor married again.

I mean that he never loved a woman; for me, his love overflowed. He had wanted a son, but did not resent me for not being one. Instead, he raised me as though I were born a boy. I learned swordsmanship from him, and how to hunt with a bow and arrow. I did the hard work of tending the farm as well as any male. He was proud of me, my father. He called me his wild rose, his sturdy flower.

Despite our best efforts, I grew into a woman. At sixteen my face was quite handsome and my chest was as well-developed as my muscles. I was too awkwardly tall, however, to be considered really beautiful, and too dark, and far too boyishly lean. Nevertheless, I was something of a legend among the boys in my village and the neighboring town. They spoke of taming me. I laughed in their faces and challenged them at arm-wrestling.

There was one boy, however, a trapper from the town, who loved me for my wildness. He courted me with furs and jewelry made from pheasant feathers. He introduced me to his hounds and let me hunt with them. "They're beautiful dogs," I told him, and he was pleased — the rest of the world called them mutts! He said I was most lovely in the dappled light of the woods. He said I had the beauty of the eagle: powerfully graceful in my size, regal in my severity. Tell me, how could I not have loved him? My clever, charming wolf, I called him.

That was the year the drought began. There was a river not too far off, and my village and my clever wolf's town banded together to dig canals. In the following year, we fared better than most of the country. How could we have guessed that would be our ruin?

I was seventeen when the old king died. I did not care then, nor did anyone I knew. We all firmly believed that royalty was royalty and had nothing to do with us. We paid our yearly dues when the taxman came and were grateful for the protection of the army, but that was the extent of it.

Or, at any rate, it _should_ have been. But when young Queen Rin took the throne, all of that changed. The royal guard descended on our relatively prosperous village and ransacked our farms like an invading army. They slaughtered our animals, cut down our crops, and carried both back with them to the aristocrats in the capitol. The neighboring town was pillaged as well, and my love's poor noble dogs were shot when they tried to protect their master's home.

Fearing starvation, many of the villagers and townspeople left to seek work in the cities. But my father, who had grown up in the slums, steadfastly refused to give up on the farm. Harvest season was already upon us, and it was far too late to start growing again. Without even chickens for eggs or goats for milk, hunting was for the rest of that year our only source of food. The animals of the woods, though, were also feeling the effects of the drought, and those that could had long since moved on. Throughout the whole autumn, there was not one night we did not go to bed hungry.

Then came winter, and there was hardly anything to be had at all. My father ate very little. He insisted what game we could come by belonged to me. I made token efforts to dissuade him, sometimes even refusing to eat until he'd had his fair share, but I was weak in will and he always outlasted me. If we _had _split the meat evenly between us we both would likely have starved.

Throughout my childhood my father had been strong and rugged. He was a solid oak tree of a man, my shelter and my support. Now, before my eyes, he withered away like a dried-out twig. To see him so reduced, to find myself caring for him as though he were a sickly child and I his mother, pained me more than I can tell. But the horrible truth is — and this is the first of my many dark secrets — my fear of the same happening to me was far greater than that pain. What's worse, it occurred to me even then — dare I write this down? — that while he lived I could not leave the village, for I would never forsake him to tend the farm alone in his impending old age, and so could not marry my trapper in the town. When he finally died my tears and moans were genuine, but even so a part of me was already thinking ahead three months to when the season of mourning would be over and my love and I would wed. Thus, the first of my sins: I am a wicked, ungrateful daughter.


	2. The Flower of Evil

That is the prologue. If anything in it rings hollow or false, it is because I am a different person now than I was then, and can no longer recall what love was like before it became tangled up in hatred. The hatred I do remember well, though it has long since chilled into aimless spite. What follows is how it began in earnest.

Spring came, and the worst days of hunger ended. I was not happy, but I had much hope for future happiness. My handsome wolf and I set a summer date for our marriage. I sold the farm for a good sum of money and retreated into the woods to spend what was left of the period of mourning in austerity and solitude.

One day as I was hunting, I happened to see a part of the royal guard riding by on horseback. At first I was afraid they had returned to do my home further injury, but then I noticed they were escorting a pair of young aristocrats. The nobles, a boy and a girl, appeared to be twins of about thirteen years of age. Their hair was the yellow of fresh, fatty butter, their skin that delicate pale shade only ever seen on lords and invalids. The boy dressed smartly yet sensibly — but his sister, on the other hand! Her dress was made of yellow silk and trimmed with black lace. I say "trimmed"; really, it was bloated with it. Her _petticoats_ were black lace. She had pearls on her fingers, in her ears, strung around her neck. The falcon on her arm mouthed them lazily as she rode. Her horse's mane and tail were braided. Her saddle was polished black and studded with silver, which made the dead hares hanging from it seem entirely out of place. I had never in my life beheld such a creature. Fascinated, I watched her from hiding.

"Oh, _honestly_, Len!" she was saying. She spoke so loudly I could hear her quite clearly even at a distance. "They're rabbits. They're _for_ hunting. If you don't stop being squeamish, I'll tell the cook you don't get any."

"If you say so, your highness," her brother replied with a wan smile. Him I had to strain to hear, but the "your highness" I picked out quite clearly. "Still, I do worry…"

"Hm? What do you worry about?"

"The town near here. Isn't it one of the ones that were taxed so heavily last year?"

"Is it? How would I know?"

"It just feels…"

"Yes?"

"You have to promise you won't laugh!"

"Don't you like my laughter, Len?"

"Oh, well then! It just feels a bit like poaching." She did laugh, loudly, and he broke out in a blush.

"Oh, Len, I love you dearly!" she exclaimed. "You're so sentimental. Ah, but _they're_ rabbits too! Their lives are so filthy and short, the pitiful things! But don't you worry about them. They breed so, filling up their dirty little burrows, I dare say we'll never run out of them."

"If you say so, your highness."

"Len, you mustn't go soft on me. I'm telling you: it's no good. They'd be poor if we never taxed them a penny. They'd be poor if we stripped ourselves bare and gave them everything we own. They wouldn't know what to _do_ with wealth. Poor's in the blood; it's the natural, animal state of things. It needs to be bred out over generations."

"If you say so, your highness."

"You don't believe me at all, do you? Don't you know, Len, that all the flowers in all the world's gardens are distantly descended from wild plants? But do you think any gardener in his right mind would plant a weed among rose bushes and try to grow it into one? I'm sure you can guess what would come of _that_. No, the weeds mustn't be allowed to strangle the roses. If they get into the garden, there's always the compost heap. Oh, that's not so shocking, is it? Don't look like that. That's how you look at my birds when they bring us tasty rabbits. I think it's terribly ungrateful of you. Is it a bird's fault she has talons, or that rabbits are so tasty, or that— _Len!_"

He had jumped in front of her, knocking her off her horse, and now lay beside her on the ground with an arrow sticking out from his shoulder. I felt nothing but a cold, gray calm. My mind was clear and still, no longer pounding with the unbearable understanding of what my father had died for. I hadn't skewered her through the throat or punched a hole into her skull, but at least I'd succeeded in _shutting her up_.

And then I noticed the royal guard charging toward the bushes I was concealed behind.

I felt a tug at my back, and my quiver lifted over my head. Suddenly _he_ was beside me, taking the bow from my hands. "Run, you little fool," my fiancé hissed. "Hide! Quick!"

"How—?" I began.

"No time!" And then he shoved me to the ground and broke through the thicket to stand in the way of the mounted soldiers. I lay stunned and uncomprehending; in all the time I'd known him, until that moment he had never laid hands on me.

They took hold of him easily; he put up only a token resistance. The queen screamed her brother's name again, and then, "Regicide! Regicide, you dog, you mutt, you cur!" She ran at him, fell upon him, pulled out his hair in large, bleeding tufts. She drew her hunting knife and gouged his arms, slashed his face, cut off one of his ears and put out one of his eyes. I will never forget the sight of his blood on her delicate, manicured hands. I was too terrified to show myself and rescue him. I was too horrified to flee and leave him behind. I could only watch.

"Your majesty!" the queen's twin called out weakly. "My lady! I need help!" That snapped her out of it; she looked from my fiancé to the knife in her hands as though embarrassed by her behavior and by how far beneath her both of them were. She remounted her horse, then pulled her brother up in front of her. Cradling him in her arms she turned the horse toward the city and spurred it into a smooth but swift canter. The soldiers followed behind her, one taking the reigns of the wounded boy's unmanned mount, the other two dragging my poor love between them.

To this day I do not know how he managed to be there just when I needed him. Maybe he'd heard there were soldiers nearing the town and gone to scout them out. Maybe he'd been keeping an eye on me all through my mourning, and only then felt it necessary to intercede. But it does not matter how it happened; what matters is _that_ it happened, that because of me his life ended, and because of him mine continued on even as my last hope for happiness perished before my eyes.

I collected what supplies I had with me at camp and headed out for the capitol. In my mind my intention was to save him any way I could, but in my heart I knew it was already over. The journey took almost two days on foot, but I arrived in time to stand in the crowd at Justice Square. It was a large one; only once have I seen larger, and that would not be until more than a year later. I learned afterward that _she_ had purposely drawn it there, intending to set an example for as many people as she could. She certainly set one for me — though perhaps not in the way she intended.

That's me telling jokes — rotten jokes — to eat up space and time. I don't think that I can write this. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have the words. I ought to lay my pen down now and forget this whole ridiculous exercise. But I can't do that either. I'll skip ahead, then. Many others saw what happened that day. Perhaps some even wrote about it. None saw it through my eyes. None felt my heart die and begin to rot in my chest. But that's something that can't be written down, so what does history care?

There's just one thing that needs to be said. When, once it was all over, the young queen stood at the side of the scaffold, flanked by heavily armed and armored soldiers, and demanded of the people watching, "Now you will all bow down to me!"; when, draped in ominous, reverent silence, the crowd kneeled down to scrape the dirt with their noses; when, as the executioner pulled _his_ head from the basket and held it aloft, and the dams beneath my eyes burst, and the tears came running hot and thick, I silently swore to someday pay her back — I dropped to my knees with all the rest.


	3. Seeds of Rancor

I could not return to the village. I could not face his parents. I could not bear to live among the memories. I had brought very little money with me, but I never so much as considered going back to collect the rest.

A lower-class woman's opportunities for employment in the city are _profoundly_ limited. I know you catch my meaning; don't laugh, it is a serious problem. But I was prideful, though I no longer had any justification for it, and I did not sink so low. Instead, I disguised myself as a boy and went in search of an apprenticeship. I started with the butchers, since I had some experience in preparing meat already, but was turned away when they found out I had no father to pay my board. "I'm not looking for charity," I told them. "I'm looking for _work_."

"You and every other country bumpkin driven from their farm," was the gist of their usual response.

Growing desperate, I began to branch out, applying to everyone from tanners to bakers to blacksmiths. At last I found a printer who, when he heard my story, seemed to have some sympathy for me.

"You're a very serious young man, aren't you?" he asked. Yes, sir. "Are you a quiet young man as well?" Yes, sir. "How quiet?" As quiet as you like, sir. "And patriotic?" Sir? "You heard me, boy: do you consider yourself a patriot?" I love my country, sir. "And your queen?" As much as she loves her subjects. Sir.

That satisfied him. He clapped me warmly on the back and hired me on the spot.

The printer was a kind master. He fed me well, kept me decently clothed, and, most importantly, respected my privacy. What's more, I soon discovered his reasons for imposing such an odd interview. Certain publications of his, printed on the sly and distributed in secret, were dangerously subversive in nature. As I set the type on them, I was frequently struck by a sense of quiet dread. I pretended to believe this sense was a premonition of martyrdom, and carefully nursed it into pure, agonizing terror. At times I managed to work myself into such a state of agitation that I could hardly think through the fear pounding in my head. Those were the times I was happiest; at others the illusion would grow unsustainable and come crashing down around me, and I had to drink to forget how outrageously untroubled my life had somehow become.

Every month or so, my master would travel to our kingdom's western neighbor, Midori, to meet with a group of like-minded Kiiroans without fear of being caught. I was sometimes brought along to serve him, sometimes left behind to tend the shop. When I did have the opportunity to go, I paid closer attention than any of those good men realized. Their philosophies fascinated me, as did their knowledge of politics and royal affairs.

It was on one such occasion that I first learned the story of the boy I had wounded. Though he was, quite obviously, the twin brother of the queen, he was not, as I had originally assumed, a prince. The old king, in his last fever-addled days, had disinherited him for some slight or other, probably fairly minor, possibly entirely imagined. His sister had rescued him from banishment by taking him on as a servant, and now, title or none, he answered only to her. "Royal caprice at its finest," one of my master's comrades called it.

These meetings were hosted in the home of a Midorian merchant sympathetic to the cause. To this day I do not understand why a foreigner should have been so interested in Kiiroan politics. At first I assumed he was simply good friends with one or more of the conspirators. That was before I learned, as you soon will, just how personally invested, even obsessed at least one member of his household was. There must have been bad blood of some sort between his family and the Kiiroan royals, perhaps one of those generation-spanning grudges that only grow more vehement as time wears on and the origins are forgotten. I doubt I or anyone else will ever know, now that all of them are so long dead.

The merchant had a daughter. I often worked side by side with her at the meetings, serving the men drinks and cleaning up after them. She was perhaps two years younger than I, and beautiful in all the ways I never had been: delicate, dainty, soft and fair in her features. Her dresses were all verdant in hue, though they varied in shade: emerald, forest, olive, sea green. She was quiet, demure, often feigning blushes at me the first few times we met; she could not have known then how very little effect they had. I thought her sheltered, naïve, and perhaps a bit dim. If you read or listen to histories, you by now have probably guessed her identity, and I'll wager you thought much the same when you first heard her story as it is usually told.

"Did you know," she said to me one day as we were mixing punch in the kitchen, "that the Queen is engaged to the younger brother of the King of Ao? Prince Kaito, his name is."

"Hm," I replied.

"I suppose you did. I see quite well how you like to listen. But here's something you perhaps didn't know: he doesn't love her at all."

"That's hardly surprising," I said. "Marrying for love is the one luxury the lower classes have that the upper ones lack."

The merchant's daughter smiled secretively. "Ah, but there's a complication! She _does_ love him. As much as a creature like her _can_ love, I mean."

"Mhm. And how, exactly, would you know all this?"

Her smile grew. "He told me."

I nearly dropped the glass I was holding. "You don't mean..?"

"I do! I've met him traveling incognito through this very town!"

"Be careful with him," I told her. "Maybe you don't know what boys — even princes, I'd imagine — are like. They'll say all kinds of things, if they think it will help their case."

"I am not as simple as you suppose. I can tell the difference between false love and true."

"Can you?"

"Oh, yes! False love is marked by passionate declarations of affection, sugary sonnets, expensive gifts, and moonlit serenades."

"I see," I said, beginning at last to suspect that she was not _quite_ as foolish as I had originally thought. "And true love, I suppose, does not require all that?"

"True love is _incapable_ of it," she replied. "True love is a state of abject helplessness and vulnerability."

I didn't answer. How could I? Love and helplessness! It struck a nerve.

"And now," she continued after a moment's silence, "I must ask of you an awfully big favor. I'm going to meet him this evening. Will you see to it that we are… ah… _compromised_?"

With my mind so far off elsewhere, it took me a moment to register the oddity of what she'd just said. "Surely you mean that you _aren't_ compromised?"

She gave an embarrassed laugh. "Oh dear! You must have thought I loved him back. No, I mean you must have us discovered, and by the right people."

I stared. "What exactly do you think that will accomplish?" I blurted out, horrified.

"Oh, any number of things!" she replied cheerfully. "At the very least, it will place _her_ right in the middle of a most inconvenient scandal."

"And what," I asked, "if she decides to take it out on you?"

Her smile withered like dry paper set to a candle's flame. "All the better," she said, and there was no more laughter in her voice. "Won't a man avenge the girl he loves, whoever her persecutor may be?" For the second time that conversation, I was struck dumb. "That _gentlemen's club _out there," she went on, gesturing towards the wall separating the kitchen from the parlor, "how serious do you think they are? Will they ever do anything but talk, and talk, and publish pamphlets that only they ever read? Building themselves up so that they can feel like _men_… Oh, I can't bear it! That it should fall on the shoulders of girls like us..! Ah!" She covered her mouth with both hands and looked at me guiltily. For a long time I did not respond. When I did, it was only to agree to help in her plot.

What can I say for myself? I was thrown off by how unexpectedly sharp she had revealed herself to be, but not so much that I failed to recognize it was a desperate, foolish plan. It was also the only plan I had. I could have done nothing and waited for a more opportune time to act. I could have waited my whole life, and who can say how many lives would have been better or worse, longer or shorter for it? But if we are helpless in the grip of love, what are we in that of hatred? And what when we are seized by both?

Still, I have no excuse.


	4. Weeds Grow

In my defense — and hers as well — we could not possibly have imagined what the full consequences of our actions would be. I have many faults, but they do not include the sort of temperament that would burn, salt, and put to the sword an entire kingdom to avenge a personal slight, nor even consider it.

A draft was put in place. My master the printer was shot for refusing his summons, and I forced to become a girl again in order to escape. The cities were ransacked to supply the war, as once the towns and villages had been to supply the cities. Only the villas of the nobility were spared. I retreated into the countryside, though not to my old home, and took up hunting again. It seemed to me the surest source of sustenance in such times, but the diet of game without grains or vegetables to supplement it made me frequently ill.

It was months before news came of the merchant's daughter's death. By this point I was not so much sorry to have lost a friend — I suppose she was a friend — as I was relieved that the war would finally be ending. When that did not happen—

Well, what can I say about "when that did not happen"? I must have gone mad. Looking back on those times, recalling my actions, trying with limited success to recall my frame of mind, that is the only conclusion I can come to. It was not at first my intention, when I walked back to the place of my birth, barged into a home that was no longer mine, and donned my father's armor, to amass an army large enough to necessitate the calling back of the queen's. At that time I had only one thought: _I will kill her or die trying._ But as, inexplicably, the rest of the town came out to follow me — I suppose they must have been as mad as I; I suppose our country had reached the point that madness was necessary to survival — the idea occurred to me gradually, like a soaked cloth sinking into the muddied waters of my mind. So we marched from town to town and village to village, gathering to us few swords or spears but many pitchforks, hatchets, and sickles.

(I suppose this is as good a time as any to address some of the crass stupidities I all too frequently encounter in depictions of these scenes. In writing and song I am given stirring speeches that soar to the loftiest reaches of political philosophy. I will tell you right now that such theories were at the moment the furthest thing from my mind; that establishing self-rule would not even occur to me until after the battle had been fought and won, and as of recent I sometimes regret it ever occurred to me at all; and that, furthermore, the longest speech to pass my lips in those days was, "Everyone, come with me!" In paintings and tapestries I am shown as a grimly beautiful warrior woman, more often than not with _form-fitting armor._ In truth, my armor barely fit at all, and as for beauty, the kindest word that could be used for my appearance then is "sexless." After all the time I'd spent in the woods, even "handsome" would be going too far.)

We advanced on the capitol. The queen's army had been withdrawn from Midori to protect the city, but when the drafted men saw that our forces were made up largely of women and old men, most of them defected to our side or else threw down their weapons and refused to fight. The career soldiers remained, and they far outmatched us in skill and equipment, but their numbers had been diminished by the fighting abroad. It seemed to be a stalemate: they could not fight us off, but we had little hope of breaking through the city's outer defenses. Laying siege was out of the question; the capitol, after all, was where most of the nobles were concentrated, and they had more supplies within the walls of their castles and villas than we did in the rest of the country combined. Nevertheless, we set up camp. Skirmishes broke out now and again when the queen's army attempted to chase us away, but as time passed it began to look as though nothing would come of the campaign besides a few more corpses.

I admit I fully intended to be one of them. I fought recklessly, determined to kill as many soldiers as I could. As each one fell I told myself, _this is the man who slaughtered the hens I raised from chicks. _Or, _this is the man who stole our harvest and starved my father. This is the man who shot my love's dogs. This is one of the two who dragged him away._ The grislier their deaths, the worse the crimes I projected onto them. What I wanted to destroy were the facts; I wanted everyone and everything I used to love to be alive and well. My sword could not strike at anything so abstract, so it tore through flesh and bone and left me always panting after more.

When finally my carelessness caught up to me, when one soldier seized me by the throat and hefted his mace above my head, and at last a sense of peace washed over me and I felt that I had done enough — that was when Prince Kaito arrived with an Aoan battalion, and my attacker crumpled and fell, pinning me to the ground and bleeding on me from where the blue-fletched arrow pierced his throat. Only the gradual realization that we were now strong enough to take the city and storm the castle could motivate me to shove him off and get to my feet.

That was the moment that determined the battle's outcome. For the rest, there is little to tell. Through nothing but sheer bloody-mindedness I was the first through the city gates, the first through the castle doors, the first into the throne room. I found her there. Prince Kaito was directly on my heels, and at his insistence my sword stopped at her throat. "It can wait," he said. "There is a proper way of doing these things."

The queen looked up at me indifferently and pushed the blade away with her bare hand. I was struck by how absurdly large that hand was, and what a contrast it posed to how perfectly, primly lady-like she appeared in every other aspect. I imagined such clumsy hands must have been a constant embarrassment to someone like her.

"How rude of a man!" was all she said, and lifted up her skirts to walk into the hands of the prince's guards.

"Do you mean to make a mockery of us with your composure?" I asked. "How long will that last? Do you think there can be any dignity for a severed head?" She gave no response, but I knew I was right. I had won. I should have been elated, or at the very least relieved.

I was not.

Why am I writing this? I just looked over what I have so far, and suddenly I cannot remember. I said some odd things about truth at the beginning, and compared keeping secrets to having a fever. Did I think that was clever? Why was I even trying to be clever? I don't need to impress you; you're all already more impressed than you have any right to be. I should stop here. I have by this point brought to light some facts that I am sure you will find shocking and unpleasant, but they are facts that could be set aside even in a relatively honest telling of history. Not everything I have to say is of that nature, and, now that I have come to the main point of the story, I have to wonder: what, really, is the use of turning everything people think they know upside down just for the sake of truth?

Anyhow, if you care enough to try, you can piece the rest together on your own. I have given you all the clues I had when first I figured it out for myself.


	5. Thorns

No. I am many things — many _despicable_ things — but I am not a coward. Not anymore.

I met with her in her cell the night before the execution. I _almost_ had myself convinced that I was going not to settle the doubt that had been plaguing me since her arrest, but to tell her my story and _make_ her understand all the pain that she had caused. My resolve cracked, however, the moment I saw her.

"Take off that ridiculous dress," I demanded.

Her face turned bright red. "P-pardon me?"

"You heard me. Take it off."

"You!" She was losing her composure, and in her wavering voice I heard just one more confirmation of my suspicion. "You… you insolent, slavish boy—!"

"I am not a boy!" I shouted, cutting her off. I seized her by the wrist and pressed her palm to mine, and with our hands side by side the truth became glaringly, painfully obvious. "But you are."

She — he — pulled away from me and went to sit in the corner and gaze out the window.

"Admit it." He was silent. "If you _were_ to take off the dress — or even just pull the top down — what would I see? A flat chest and the scar from my arrow."

That got his attention. He looked at me in surprise. "_Your_ arrow? But that was—" His eyes widened. "Oh. Oh God. Was he… He wasn't your brother, was he?"

"My fiancé."

"I'm sorry." He sounded earnest to the point of heartbreak, like he meant it from the core of his soul. I could have snapped his neck.

"You're not the who should be!" I said, snapping my tongue at him instead. "_She's_ still out there, and you are going to tell me where."

"I will do no such thing."

"Then…" Something in the tone of his voice and the look in his eye, something I knew I'd seen more than once before and never been able to contend with, made me falter. "Then you will be tortured."

"Are you that kind of person?" he demanded, and in the controlled anger and terse accusation I heard, _"Run, you little fool!"_

"What do you think?" I asked him. "Am I that kind of person, or the kind of person who would execute an innocent man?"

"How can I be innocent? I am her twin. If her crimes call out for blood, that same blood flows in my veins."

_"All the better. Won't a man avenge the girl he loves, whoever her persecutor may be?"_

"Are you absolutely certain that is how the world works? Certain enough to sacrifice everything for such an idea?"

He shook his head. "I will sacrifice everything for _her_."

"Then you are a fool! You're worth ten of her! Just the fact that you would do that—"

"There is something else," he said, somehow cutting me off even though his voice was much softer than my own, "that you would have seen if you had looked beneath my clothes." He fished up a small silk pouch hung on a string around his neck and from it withdrew a scrap of parchment, which he unfolded and held out to me. "Take this and read it. I am sick of holding it secret."

I did. It was a letter. I have attached it here:

_My dearest Len,_

_I must see you one last time. Come find me, I am hiding in the place we first me._

_-Your Lady in Green_

_Love is helplessness_, I thought, and at last understood how she could have known that. "You were lovers."

"Yes." He did not look at me.

"You betrayed her."

"Yes."

_And I thought you were like him_. "You told your sister where she was!

"No. I went myself." I could not respond to that; I only stared in disbelief. "She wanted to see me again, so I thought it would be…" He lifted his hands as though he were about to bury his face in them and cry, but instead he merely looked at them as they began to tremble. "But at the last moment, I froze. She wrapped her hands around mine, this hand that held the knife, and…" His fingers curled into his palms. His arms sunk to his sides, his chin to his chest, and he squeezed his eyes shut as though trying to force tears or memories back into his skull.

"Then it wasn't your fault."

"It was. I could have stopped her. I chose not to. I am no more innocent than anyone else."

I wondered at the time what he meant by that — that "than anyone else" — but I had a more pressing question to ask of him. "And what, exactly, do you expect me to do now?"

"What you must. The people need closure."

"So that is your decision?"

"It's the only way she'll be safe." Which was the last thing I wanted, but what could I do about it?

"I see," I said, and with some effort kept my voice even. "I will keep that in mind when coming to my own."

I left with those words, knowing already that I would make no decision that night. The shock of actually _winning_ followed so closely by the shock of that not meaning what I'd thought — not meaning anything at all, in fact, or else something so dark and heavy I would rather believe it was nothing — was like two blows of a hammer to my brain. My mind felt bruised and broken. All I wanted to do, all I was capable of doing, all I _did_ — was sleep.


	6. Scattered Petals

In the morning, I came to a decision: I would not decide. I would consult with Prince Kaito, and leave the matter up to him. After all, the "queen" was, formally, his prisoner, and it seemed at the time that he had seized the throne for himself and would soon be acknowledged sovereign of Kiiro.

Looking back, I can see with perfect clarity what a blatantly awful idea it was. To fully explain the situation, I had, of course, to tell the prince of the love affair between Len and the Midorian maiden, and also of his role in her death. I even showed him the letter. Through all of it he maintained a grave and dignified silence, which he broke only at the end to say, "Everything will proceed as planned. Never speak a word of this to anyone else.

(I realize now that in writing these notes I am defying his command. Good! Let's call them what they are: insubordination. I fully intend to upset the social and political order. Besides, the man deserves to be spited. He never did a thing but make a mess of wherever he went.)

I cannot remember much of what happened between that meeting and the execution. Time caught me up, dragged me along, and dropped me in Justice Square with the rope of the guillotine in my hands and the false princess laid out bound at my feet, his neck stretched across the block. Somehow he was smiling. I could not understand why until I thought to follow his gaze.

There she stood. Hooded and cloaked as she was, she seemed almost a different species from the lace-pelted beast in my memory. But the too-white hands clasped as though in prayer gave her away. _She's come to rescue him_, I thought. _She will declare her presence, and the choice will be taken out of my hands. _(For even with Prince Katio's order I felt the weight of choice.) But as precious seconds ticked by and she made no move, I gradually realized she was only there to watch. She was a coward — a selfish, useless coward whose violent acts had brought violence upon the person she loved most.

Must I say it? The blade came down.

I did not spare a glance for the corpse at my feet; my eyes stayed fixed on _her _as she crumpled sobbing to the ground. I had believed, only moments earlier as I pulled down on the rope and lifted the blade, that I was settling, putting aside my own desires for the sake of the country — or possibly just for the sake of convenience. Instead, I had reaped a more perfect vengeance than any I had ever dared to imagine. After so many months of burning with rage and volatile, molten hate that flared inward and outward and every which way, I suddenly felt empty and dead, drained of the force that moved my blood. And I wondered then — as I still do, to this very day — what was the point of any of it.

Some time must have passed between the thud of metal on wood and the shout of, "My lady! My lady, Prince Kaito is dead!" In my memory, it all blurs together; the first sound drove me into the darkest corner of my own head and the second brought me back to what is normally called reality.

"How is that possible?" I asked the messenger, one of my own soldiers rather than his, which went some way toward explaining her manner of addressing me.

The messenger faltered, as though she had somehow failed to anticipate that question. "An accident, my lady. He… he seems to have fallen on his own sword."

Throughout all of this I had been aware only in the most minimal sense of the crowd of peasants surrounding the scaffold. They did not concern me enough for me to put up with such games. Anyhow, the general population is more intelligent than the players of those games give them credit for; already I could here the sibilant storm of whispered gossip gathering like so many winds. "Don't be absurd," I snapped at the messenger. "Was it a murder or a suicide?"

"It… seems that he was alone at the time," was the most she could bring herself to say.

That was the simpler problem, but not by much. "Selfish! Who will lead this wretched country now?"

She fixed me with a pointed stare. "You will, my lady."

"How could I possibly?" I realized after those words were out that I could not fully explain how truly ill-suited I was without undermining everything, and fumbled for an excuse. "I don't have a drop of royal blood in me."

"Was this a revolution or not?

The people roared their approval, and I panicked for two reasons. The first was the prospect of having almost daily to make decisions like the one I had so recently worn myself out struggling against, decisions that would mean life or death. For passing off that responsibility as quickly as I could, I am today credited with an act of great magnanimity. (I am also credited with political brilliance for the representative system I set up in my place, though I took it almost whole cloth from my late master the printer and his comrades, and anyhow the best that I can say for it, looking at what a mess it has since then become, is that it is not measurably _worse_ than monarchy.) The second and more immediate reason was that the former queen had separated from the crowd and was now almost out of view.

I leapt from the scaffold and, without pausing to shake off the pain of the impact in my joints, broke into a run. "Burn the body immediately!" I called to the guards standing at the steps. "No one else must touch it! And no one must follow me, either!" I did not wait for an answer. The old fire in my heart had not been entirely extinguished after all; the thought of _her_ escaping reignited it, and now it once more burned me from within and heated my blood.

The queen tried to run when she realized she was being chased. I do mean that she tried; I doubt she'd ever run before in her life, at least since she was a small child, and she was terrible at it. I caught her easily and threw her to the ground, where she lay crying and choking out her brother's name. These were no crystal tears, no delicate, shining-wet streaks. Her face was red and puffed with salt and slimy with snot, drool, and yesterday's make-up. She cried not like a queen, but like a real girl with a real heart. I looked at her then, and in that moment I saw her for what she was: not a monster, not some beautiful demon or fallen angel, but a spoiled, ignorant child with more power than she could handle.

"No," I told her, "I won't kill you. You get to live with this guilt for the rest of your life. That's my punishment. Let it be yours too. It's no mercy; I don't think I could come up with anything worse."

"You're a brute!" she cried helplessly. "You're nothing but a common animal! Len! Oh, Len!"

"That's right," I said, and the calmness of my own voice surprised me. "Call me all the names you can think of. Haven't you realized yet? Don't you see? _We are the same_."

She inhaled sharply, swallowing her last sob, and lay silent. I left her there, a sliver of flesh and bone and a heap of rough brown cloth in the gutter of a hostile city. That was the last I ever saw of her, but for all I know she's still alive. If she is, I doubt she is any happier than I am.

So there it is, all laid out in ink. This is my secret truth: that I killed the innocent twin and let the guilty one go free — all out of pure spite.

The Midorian girl we call a martyr was of a kind with Queen Rin and myself; there was someone she loved, and her own selfish vindictiveness destroyed him. Prince Kaito was little better. It is no secret that he dragged his army and his people into war for the sake of a personal vendetta. Yet even knowing this, Kiiroans celebrate him as a hero for the same act, albeit on a smaller scale, for which we killed our queen. I think I like Len best. Perhaps he was, as he said, as guilty as anyone else, but out of all of us he was the only one who worked to _protect_ something rather than to destroy — even if it was the thing that least deserved protecting.

But now I have veered off from history and am talking nonsense. Or — now that I have worked through my compulsion, I must ask myself — is that how it's been from the beginning? I suddenly feel quite certain that no one will read these notes, no matter how conspicuously I place them. If they begin to, they will shake their heads and say, "The poor batty old woman!" and, repulsed, move on to something else. I think this was a mistake. Before I sat down to write, I must have confused myself into believing there were people — thousands upon thousands of people, nearly all of the people in Kiiro — with such a great interest in me that not even revulsion could turn them away. I must have forgotten that it isn't me they care about, but Meiko Sakine the Bold, Meiko Sakine the heroine of the so-called Liberty War. Perhaps I am her, somewhere deep inside, but I am also Meiko Sakine the Spiteful. Meiko Sakine the Venegeful. Meiko Sakine the Coward. And now I am Meiko Sakine the Penitent, the lonely old woman plagued by doubt and regret, without enough of a heart left to heal or a soul to absolve. Meiko Sakine the Burnt-Out and Hollow. History has no room for so many Meiko Sakines.

Perhaps I will burn these notes. Perhaps not. Let history be what it is, and may my grave seal it off from my ears.


End file.
